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Thursday, April 21. 2011

Another batch of 40 book notes, my first such since February 12.
Didn't even have that much backlog, probably because I've spent very
little time in bookstores lately (aside from the Borders closeout),
but I've been researching this since Tuesday and they're piling up.
So maybe another next week instead of next month.

Eric Alterman: Kabuki Democracy: The System vs. Barack Obama
(paperback, 2011, Nation Books): Liberal columnist, tries to present
a case that Obama's post-election turn to the right is the fault of a
system that is deeply and intractably conservative. That may be true,
to a point, but it isn't very reassuring: seems to me like an indictment
both of the system and the man unwilling to risk his political future
on convincing the American people to do the right things.

Joe Bageant: Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir (paperback,
2011, Scribe): Previously wrote Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches
From America's Class War (2007, Crown), the cursory tales of a
class-conscious redneck. Might seem presumptuous to write a memoir,
but he got cancer and died already, so quit bitching.

Moustafa Bayoumi, ed: Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: The
Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course
of the Israel/Palestine Conflict (paperback, 2010, Haymarket):
Too soon, I'd say, to say much about deflecting the course of the
conflict, but Israel's display of gratuitous violence certainly
had the effect of driving their once-carefully cultivated alliance
with Turkey off the deep end.

Wendell Berry: What Matters? Economics for a Renewed
Commonwealth (paperback, 2010, Counterpoint): Collection
of essays, mostly from old books but possibly some new stuff.
Farmer, writer, community-minded, so old-fashioned he cuts through
a lot of new-fangledness we readily take for granted, more often
than not making profound points.

David Brooks: The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love,
Character, and Achievement (2011, Random House): What is it
about New York Times columnists that drives them to such extreme
heights of idiocy?

James Carroll: Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City
Ignites Our Modern World (2011, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt):
Sometime journalist, sometime historian, always Catholic, takes a
dim view of war and prejudice which leads to some soul searching.
Not sure what exactly this covers or why it matters, except inasmuch
as the histories of western religion and war have been interweaved,
and still are.

G Paul Chambers: Head Shot: The Science Behind the JFK
Assassination (2010, Prometheus): Another review of the
evidence, this time bolstered by the author's physics credentials.
Doesn't indulge in conspiracy speculation, but does reject the
official story that all shots came from a single gun.

Diane Coyle: The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy
as if the Future Matters (2011, Princeton University Press):
Challenges: Happiness, Nature, Posterity, Fairness, Trust; Obstacles:
Measurement, Values, Institutions; The Manifesto of Enough. Looks like
a fairly serious attempt to reframe economics within the constraints
of sustainability, occasioned by the evident looming of crises ranging
from resource exhaustion to climate change.

Gerard Dumenil/Dominique Levy: The Crisis of Neoliberalism
(2011, Harvard University Press): The collapse as a crisis of ideology
on top of deep-seated fissures. Rx includes: "limits on free trade and
the free international movement of capital; policies aimed at improving
education, research, and infrastructure; reindustrialization; and the
taxation of higher incomes."

Howard Friel: The Lomborg Deception: Setting the Record Straight
About Global Warming (2010, Yale University Press): One thing
that makes me doubt Bjorn Lomberg's Skeptical Environmentalist
shtick is how readily our good friends at Koch Industries reprint his
arguments, especially against global warming. This may seem specialized,
but Lomborg himself is a cottage industry.

David N Gibbs: First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention
and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (paperback, 2009, Vanderbilt
University Press): Another critical book on the US intervention in
Yugoslavia, and evidently one of the best. A lot of strange things
about those wars, not to mention apologists and advocates like
Samantha Powers.

James Gleick: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
(2011, Pantheon): The journalist who hipped everyone to chaos theory
digs up something less novel: information theory -- or maybe it's just
that I've been reading about Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener,
and John Von Neumann for decades now. I was much impressed with Gleick's
Chaos and his Feynman biography Genius, but thought he
wrote Faster a bit too fast. He should have come up with more
than he did there.

Jeff Goodell: How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and
the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth's Climate (2010, Houghton
Mifflin): Journalist, wrote Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind
America's Energy Future (2007), looks into various schemes to
solve global warming by investing new ways to perturb the atmosphere
even more.

Philip Hasheider: The Complete Book of Butchering, Smoking,
Curing, and Sausage Making: How to Harvest Your Livestock &
Wild Game (paperback, 2010, Voyageur Press): Looks essential
for anyone willing to contemplate just where your meat comes from,
even if you're not quite ready to take the next step and do it
yourself.

Jonathan Haslam: Russia's Cold War: From the October Revolution
to the Fall of the Wall (2011, Yale University Press): We could
use a systematic history of the Cold War from Soviet viewpoints. Not
sure if this is it. One thing that makes me uncomfortable is a previous
title: The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende's Chile: A
Case of Assisted Suicide. Suicide?

Mark Hertsgaard: Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on
Earth (2011, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt): Global warming horror
story, featuring author's daughter who can reasonably expect to live
long enough to see as much as author prognosticates. James Hansen did
something similar, calling his latest Storms of My Grandchildren.

Shir Hever: The Political Economy of Israel's Occupation:
Repression Beyond Exploitation (paperback, 2010, Pluto Press):
The subtitle is key. Most colonial establishments sought to exploit
cheap native labor, and Israel has done more of that than is commonly
acknowledge. But the early focus on "Hebrew Labor" aimed at displacing
native Palestinians, and Israel has repeatedly worked to isolate and
suppress the Palestinian economy.

Frederic Jameson: Valences of the Dialectic
(2009; paperback, Verso, 2010): One of the first American critics
to set himself up as an authority on critical Marxist thinkers --
his 1972 book Marxism and Form lists Adorno, Benjamin,
Marcuse, Bloch, Lukacs, and Sartre on the cover -- and he's had
a long run ever since. Big book (640 pp) on dialectic theories,
Hegel and Sartre in particular, with an attempt to establish
their continued relevance.

Diana Johnstone: Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and
Western Illusions (paperback, 2003, Monthly Review Press):
I've never managed to get a good grip on what the US did in Bosnia
and Kosovo in the 1990s, other than to notice that the cult of
"Humanitarian Intervention" smelled funny. This is one book I've
seen commonly referenced by critics, all the more timely as the
Humanitarians are once again on the march.

Toby Craig Jones: Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water
Forged Modern Saudi Arabia (2010, Harvard University
Press): It's certainly obvious that the economic parameters of
Saudi Arabia are determined by oil and water: oil pays for the
economy, but lack of water limits how much of that wealth can
be reinvested in the country. Other books tend to focuse on
religion -- something we used to call superstructure.

Stanley Kurtz: Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold
Story of American Socialism (2010, Treshold Editions): The
hits keep on coming, this exceptionally lame one by a National
Review hack (also Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy
Center). More imaginative is David Freddoso's latest, Gangster
Government: Barack Obama and the New Washington Thugocracy (2011,
Regnery); hallucinatory even is Jack Cashill's Deconstructing
Obama: The Life, Loves, and Letters of America's First Postmodern
President (2011, Threshold), which reveals that Obama's books
were actually written by "terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers." Also out
soon is Jerome R. Corsi Ph.D.: Where's the Birth Certificate:
The Case That Barack Obama Is Not Eligible to Be President
(2011, WND). I should set up a separate file for all this shit --
all four authors here are serial offenders.

Pauline Maier: Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788 (2010, Simon & Schuster): Despite veneration of
the Founding Fathers, I suspect that most Tea Partiers, had they known
anything about the subject, would have sided with the anti-federalists
against ratifying the U.S. Constitution. Don't know whether that had
any effect on Maier -- one of the leading historians of the period --
or whether she was just interested in the selling and resistance to
such a fundamental political change, as opposed to the much better
known story of how the Constitution was framed.

Manning Marable: Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
(2011, Viking): Major new biography, reportedly ten years in the works.
Marable, who died a few days before this book was released, has over a
dozen books on African-American history and politics, most recently
Beyond Boundaries: The Manning Marable Reader (2010; paperback,
2011, Paradigm), going back through Black Liberation in Conservative
America (paperback, 1999, South End) to W.E.B. DuBois: Black
Radical Democrat (paperback, 1986, Twayne).

Sari Nusseibeh: What Is a Palestinian State Worth?
(2011, Harvard University Press): Eminent Palestinian, president of
Al-Quds University, previously wrote his autobiography Once Upon
a Country: A Palestinian Life, tries to look beyond two-state
jargon to basic human rights.

Annie Proulx: Bird Cloud (2011, Simon & Schuster):
Memoir by the novelist, about her adopted chunk of Wyoming. She
wrote one of fewer than five works of fiction I read during the
last decade -- the short story collection Close Range
(the one with "Brokeback Mountain"), which I picked up because
I found a section on cattle ranching as knowledgeable as the
best nonfiction (and superbly written as well). Picked this up
in the Borders closeout, then forgot to include it in my post.

Mazin B Qumsiyeh: Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History
of Hope and Empowerment (paperback, 2011, Pluto Press): A
hard-working American activist. Comes at a time when I see little
in the way of empowerment or hope.

Olivier Roy: Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part
Ways (2010, Columbia University Press): French expert on Islam
(and Islamism) generalizes about religion in an age of holy wars.

Bernie Sanders: The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate
Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class (paperback, 2011,
Nation Books): Runs 288 pages, pretty long for a speech; was given
after Obama struck his deal with the devil to extend the Bush tax cuts
for the ultra-rich.

Stephen Singular: The Wichita Divide: Revisiting the Murder
of Dr. George Tiller (2011, St Martin's Press): Previously
wrote books on the murder of radio talk jock Alan Berg, on Wichita's
"BTK" serial killer, on Mormon polygamist Warren Jeffs, and on the
Jon Benet Ramsey case. Looks beyond Scott Roeder to the culture
warriors moving him along.

David Sirota: Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the
World We Live In Now: Our Culture, Out Politics, Our Everything
(2011, Ballantine): The 1980s, that means Ronald Reagan, a new morning
for conservatism; still, there's something unrequited about the whole
experience. By the late 1960s, even the early 1970s, liberalism seemed
to have been fulfilled, with little more to do, it actually became fat
and lazy. But conservatives are insatiable -- they've thrown us into
wars, wrecked the economy, resurrected fear and loathing, yet they're
never satisfied, so even today we have to spend all our efforts keeping
them at bay. I guess that's what Sirota means, but all I see at Amazon
is a list of "Five '80s Flicks That Explain How the '80s Still Define
Our World": Ghostbusters (1984), Die Hard (1988), Rambo:
First Blood Part II (1985), Rocky III (1982), and The Big
Chill (1983). What does all that mean? (BTW, the most popular films
of the 1980s were E.T. and the first two Stars Wars, with
Raiders of the Lost Ark and two more Indiana Jones flicks filling
up most of the top ten.)

David Swanson: War Is a Lie (paperback, 2010, David
Swanson): Looks like a catalog of lies told to justify, to rationalize,
to excuse war. While each war has its own historical context, the
arguments used to promote and protract those ware are pretty much
always the same, so it's recognize them, recognize the falsehoods
they contain, and be prepared to counter them. Swanson previously
wrote Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a
More Perfect Union (paperback, 2009, Seven Stories Press).

Lance Taylor: Maynard's Revenge: The Collapse of Free Market
Macroeconomics (2011, Harvard University Press): For a brief
moment during the great crash of 2008 it seemed likely that economists
would rediscover John Maynard Keynes. Taylor wrote this book in that
moment, a healthy dose of I-told-you-so. Most likely all true too,
but a little late: more timely would be a book on the recovery of
stupidity once the crisis started to pass.

Todd Tucker: Atomic America: How a Deadly Explosion and a
Feared Admiral Changed the Course of Nuclear History (2009;
Free Press; paperback, 2010, Bison Books): The explosion was in
Idaho in 1961, when a small research reactor melted down, raising
the question of how safe and sane nuclear power is. The admiral
was Hyman Rickover, wo pushed for atomic-power aircraft carriers
and submarines, in turn working to cover up the risks.

Siva Vaidhyanathan: The Googlization of Everything (And Why
We Should Worry) (2011, University of California Press): Author
has written a couple of good books on internet-era social impacts --
Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How
It Threatens Creativity and The Anarchist in the Library: How
the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and
Crashing the System -- so I take his worrying more seriously than
the sour grapes in Ken Auletta's Googled: The End of the World as
We Know It. Still, I don't yet know what he's getting at.

Bing West: The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out
of Afghanistan (2011, Random House): Ex-Marine, veteran of
Reagan's Defense Dept., dependable supporter of America's wars as
recently as his 2008 pro-surge book on Iraq (The Strongest Tribe:
War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq), doesn't seem to like
what the US is doing in Afghanistan, casting doubts on the sacred
COIN theology. Hmm.

Garry Wills: Outside Looking In: Adventures of an Observer
(2010, Viking): A memoir of sorts, by a journalist who started out in
William Buckley's conservative orbit and gradually turned into a fierce
critic of America's abuse of power, from Vietnam to Bush and not neglecting
the embarrassing Bill Clinton. Also wrote much about American history,
and about religion. Not sure what all we'll find here, but should be
interesting.

Richard Wolffe: Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside
the Obama White House (2010, Crown): Author of Renegade:
The Making of a President (2009), boasts "unrivaled access to
the West Wing," timed his sequel to follow Obama's mid-term election
fiasco. Not sure if the title signals anything other than author's
desire to keep that "unrivaled access" going for another book.

Tim Wu: The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information
Empires (2010, Knopf): A history of telecommunications (and
analogous technological businesses) from isolated innovation to monopoly
to dissolution, as if that represents some sort of law of development.
Describes his prime example fairly well, but hard to say how ironclad
the rule is.

Kai Bird: Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between
the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978 (2010; paperback, 2011,
Simon & Schuster): Author's father was a US diplomat in Jerusalem,
Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and author studied in Lebanon. Starts as a
memoir, but provides useful history especially on the 1956 and 1967
wars, plus a rather critical view of King Hussein.
[link]

James Bradley: The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of
Empire and War (2009; paperback, 2010, Little Brown):
Teddy Roosevelt's machinations to parlay America's new imperial
presence in the East Pacific into influence in Asia, a first
step toward America's wars in Asia.
[link]

Jacob S Hacker/Paul Pierson: Winner-Take-All Politics:
How Washington Made the Rich Richer -- and Turned Its Back on the
Middle Class (2010; paperback, 2011, Simon & Schuster):
Not just the middle class, which still gets lip service because
they have the most to lose. Important study of politically-induced
inequality: what happened if not necessarily why.

Simon Johnson/James Kwak: 13 Bankers: The Wall Street
Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (2010, Pantheon;
paperback, 2011, Vintage): One of the main books on the financial
crisis, focusing on the bankers caused it and the political clout
that let them off the hook.
[link]

Michael Lewis: The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
(2010; paperback, 2011, WW Norton): Breezy book on the great financial
meltdown, told by tracking the stories of a few traders who bet against
the housing bubble and made a killing.
[link]

Peter Maass: Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil
(2009, Knopf; paperback, 2010, Vintage): Far-reaching tour of the
dirty world of the oil industry. Paperback has a dirtier cover.

Bill McKibben: Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
(2010; paperback, 2011, St Martin's Press): Another global warming
alert, more harrowing than ever, packaged with proposals for changing
the economy, living more sustainably, anything but toughing it out.
[link]

Gary Wills: Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the
National Security State (2010; paperback, 2011, Penguin
Books): Give a president the power to blow up the world and he
starts thinking executive power really means something; pretty
much everyone starts thinking that, and soon enough you don't
have much of a democracy any more. Sound familiar?
[link]